


Sticky Sweet

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Strange Days at Black Hole High [4]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teenagers, F/F, Party Games, Sleepovers, Trans Female Character, ah the awkward daring of youth, it's Tenna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 15:56:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16452896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: one Ouija board, several pieces of cake, and a tenuous birthday truce later...Tess is very, very gay: the fic





	Sticky Sweet

**Author's Note:**

> author's qualifications: was a teenager, was a gay, was a gay teenager. Inspired by some of the posts on the incorrectjthmquotes tumblr, but not actually lifting any of them. Sometimes you just wanna write about boobs, idk what to tell you.

Tenna’s room would have been called an attic, with its vaulted ceiling and exposed beams, if it hadn’t been for the warmth of the quilted comforters thrown over every surface which would stand still, and the beautiful view through her porthole window of the glowing neighborhood below. It really was the best bedroom of anyone Tess knew, with its wide wall perfect for projecting movies onto and its tiny ancient microwave perfect for popping popcorn. Despite that, Tenna was forever waiting for her ship to finally come in, in the form of the sleek minifridge she asked for every single holiday. This birthday apparently had not come through.

Currently, she was snapping a party hat onto Nny’s head in a stunning display of not only fearlessness but blatant disregard for her own safety, so when the knock came at the bedroom door it was Tess who climbed off the loveseat to get it. She fumbled to pull the door open, fingers greasy with popcorn butter, and found herself face to face with Anne Gwish.

“Um,” she said.

Fully dolled up in liner and lipstick, Anne settled a hand on the hip of her dress. It was velvet, is the first thing you should know, with sleeves as long as the skirt was short. The black socks with the white lines stopped just above her knees. It was certainly not a look she could have gotten away with at school, and even as Tess looked back up, the tops of those thigh-highs were imprinted on her memory like they’d been etched in acid.

“What are you doing here?” she said, apparently rendered dumb by the unexpected development.

“I was _invited_ ,” Anne said, “what are _you_ doing here?”

Somewhere behind Tess, Tenna shouted, “Hey Anne, d’you bring the board?”

“Yeah,” Anne drawled, patting the bag at her side. Peaking over the top of it, in stark black and white, the mystical and forbidden runes of the $12 Target Ouija Board.

Tess stepped aside to let Anne through in a huff of longsuffering velvet. It was surreal to see her here, in her dangerously short skirt, with the sky outside the porthole window going purple along the horizon. Although they all had lunch together in a broad sense—the front lawn of the school blooming with their jackets and repurposed picnic sheets—Tess had only rarely seen Anne outside of school hours, and only a previous few times without Cleo in her perpetual shadow. Speaking of which-

“So, where’s,” Tess said, at which point she was cut off by Anne saying, “She’s sick. Mono maybe. I _told_ her not to make out with a band kid, you never know _where_ they’ve been. Here, take this,” and shoved her bag into Tess’s arms.

“Anne’s gonna do us a séance,” Tenna said, twisting away from where Nny was glowering with two party hats sticking off his head like sparkly blue horns.

“You invited _Anne?”_ Devi said, pausing from where she was pinning up the sheet on the wall, the tallest of everyone present.

“Devi, be nice.”

“What? It’s not _me_ , I’m worried about,” Devi said, giving Nny—who was watching Anne with the blank intensity of a cat—a meaningful look.

In a rush of ashes, Tess felt all her hopes for the night dissolve around her. She’d really thought things were turning a _corner_ for her. With Dillon in the hospital, babbling nonsense and in no fit shape to remember his own name let alone anyone else’s, for the first time one of her attempts to break up with someone had actually _taken_. Suddenly there was a whole world of possibilities, such as… such as not eating with the same titchy crew of jerks every day! Maybe only on days that ended with Y.

Such as talking to people she’d always considered herself too imperiled socially to speak with before.

The fact about Devi and her friends was that they were always a little _removed_ from the rest of the black nail polish set. Everyone knew Devi was as likely to laugh at you as look at you, and there was a kind of power in that—although a lonely kind of power, Tess thought, because when you were too self possessed to be bothered with people, soon you found that there were no people _to_ bother with.

Devi cut a striking figure, seventeen years old and nearly six feet tall in her monster boots, impatient with anything that stood between her and the places she was bound for. But she liked to laugh, and this was the thing—she wasn’t too big to laugh at herself. With someone like that, Tess was as lost as a sailor without a compass.

They’d been in American History when Devi had leaned over to her and said, “Is it just me, or was this textbook written by some kind of deranged patrio-bot?”

And Tess, high on the knowledge that she had just that morning said _no_ to an party invite from one of Dillon’s bandmates and even stuck to it, said: “There’s a whole chapter on _Americanism_ vs _communism_. I don’t think it’s been updated since the sixties.”

“God, is there really?” she’d said, and immediately started flipping through the book. “Oh no, look at this, there’s a _presentation project._ You wanna help me explain how in Mother Russia we train dogs to eat American babies starting with the toes?”

So Tess had really been thinking here the last month or two that thing were turning around for her. She’d taken the birthday invitation as a sign that she’d finally made it, after months of seeding compliments and offering pencils and basically ingratiating herself in any way that wouldn’t require the full blown burning of bridges.

And now here was Anne, poised to ruin it all.

Tenna clapped her hands together. “It’s my birthday,” she said, in the no nonsense tones of a first grade teacher, “so anyone who causes trouble is not only going to get an ear full of disciplinary party-popper, but I will also see to it that they receive _no_ cake.”

She gave Nny a particularly pointed look.

“Tenna,” he said, visibly wounded, “I would _never_ violate the sanctity of the birthday slumber party. Even if she did make fun of my hair yesterday and think she could get _away_ with it, as if I don’t hear every word that comes out of her poisonous mouth, the serpent, as if she thinks she can _evade_ my vengeance when I am only ever a moment away from striking, a shadow in the rushes, an undertow around her extremely breakable ankles—”

At this point he had climbed the back of the loveseat and was halfway off the back of it, staring at Anne with his black eyes full of murder. Tess coughed, and searched for something else to look at.

“—Besides,” Nny said, after a moment, drawing back a bit. “I’m seeing a therapist now, and she says revenge is a dish best served cold, precise, and merciless.”

“Like gazpacho soup,” Tenna volunteered.

“Yeah,” Devi muttered, “you just can’t have enough precision in your _soup_. Anne, if you’re coming in then come _in._ I need another hand with the tacks over here.”

Anne rolled her eyes but tottered over anyway, nearly as tall as Devi in her heels. Tenna fixed the angle of the party hat horns and went back to sorting through her movie shelf, filling the attic with the sound of VHS tapes clattering into each other.

“What do you think?” she called out, “ _Rocky Horror_ or _Evil Dead_? Either way I’m throwing popcorn at the screen.”

Tess breathed a sigh of relief. Okay. Okay. Maybe this would be fine after all.

 

For two hours, they sat in the darkness and threw popcorn at the evil dead, and yelled out bits of mismatched Rocky Horror audience dialogue until the sky outside was a black void dotted with the windows of other houses not unlike this one. Devi hooked her arm under Tess’s and together they shouted _slut!_ at Ash Williams, and Tess was happy.

 

“Truth or Dare is so _juvenile_ ,” Anne said.

“It’s Tenna’s birthday,” Tess said, smelling an argument and rushing to ease the peace. “We should play whatever she wants to play, right?”

Anne _hmmphed_.

“I wanna play Never Have I Ever,” Tenna said, and blew the noisemaker until the little frog tongue uncurled.

“You _always_ want to play that,” Devi said, “and you spend the whole game trying to get me out.” She whacked the knife down into the cake, splattering chocolate frosting across the table. “You know too much about me. If you ever betray me, I’ll have to kill you.”

Tenna nodded amiably. “That’s fair. You’re the Jonathan Harker to my Mina.”

“I want to be the one who stakes Devi,” Nny said, with a warning edge in his voice, and then more sweetly, “We have that kind of relationship, don’t we Devi?”

Devi lifted the knife, judging her aim. “I think you’re more of a Lucy,” she said. “There’s no way I go before you do.”

Nny brightened up. “Oh,” he said, “well Lucy is alright. Votes for women, am I right?”

At the mirror, Anne paused with her lipstick to her mouth. “Why is _Johnny_ here?” she said. “Isn’t a sleepover supposed to be for girls _only?_ ”

“I’m an honorary girl,” Nny said, with a sniff, and accepted the first slice of cake from Devi.

“He really wanted to come,” Tenna said. She blew the noisemaker again, for punctuation.

“Okay, if we’re going to play the game we better circle up,” Devi said, making no move to circle anywhere. In accordance with the laws of social gravity, everyone else shuffled in around her. Anne slung herself over the loveseat like an exhausted matron, and Tess wiggled down into a cache of pillows.

“I’ll go first,” Tenna said. “Never have I eveeeerrrrr… knowingly eaten expired yogurt because I was too lazy to walk to the corner store and buy more.”

Devi lifted her middle finger. “I will destroy you.”

Tenna nudged Anne until she huffed out a breath and said, “Fine. Never have I ever worn _brown_ shoes with a _black_ outfit.”

“That’s bullshit,” Devi said, immediately, “I can’t remember every outfit I’ve ever worn!”

“You’ve done it,” Anne said, smugly. “I’ve seen you.”

“You _have_ done it,” Nny said, eyeing Anne, “although I resent on your behalf the implication that it is some sort of unpardonable sin. They’re both _neutrals_ , you hawkish prima donna.”

 Both Tenna and Devi raised another finger, with great reluctance on Devi’s part.

“Okay, _well_ ,” Devi said, “Never have I ever deliberately given myself asthma by smoking _menthols_.”

Anne primly raised one finger. “I’ll have you know I haven’t seen a day of physical education since the diagnosis.”

That was true. Tess in her uncomfortable red shorts and sweat-stained t-shirt had devoted many blistering middays to wishing she’d been smart enough to do it first. Not one to be caught in a changing room was Anne Gwish. Cleo was just as bad, but she didn’t even bother to manufacture a medical condition—she went straight for the cigarettes and got up healthy as a goddamn horse.

Tess vividly remembered the day she’d come up from the track field, redder and hotter than the iron of a stovetop, only to find the two of them lounging in the shade at the top of the hill. She’d never felt Anne Gwish stare harder than that, taking in every inch of Tess’s beading skin and water-soaked t-shirt, the whole graceless messy wreck of her.

“Nny?” Devi said, in the waiting silence.

Tess shook the memory out of her head, reached for the plates of cake Devi had carved off, and found that there were none left.

“Let’s see…” Nny said, with four paper plates stacked underneath his current slice of cake. “It’s always easier to think of things you _have_ done than things you haven’t, isn’t it. Hm. I have never eaten chalk.”

Devi’s knife _thocked_ down into the cake platter. “Are you ganging up on me too?” she said, staring down at him.

He folded his arms over his knees and blinked back up at her. “I want you to be the one who stakes me,” he said. “It’s my dearest wish.”

 “I’ll put you on my list,” Devi said. “Tess?”

Tess ran her teeth over her molars, anxiety spiking immediately under the four sets of eyes that turned to rest on her. What had she—well what hadn’t she—well, what did she know—

“Um,” she said, “never have I ever had a piercing?”

Devi let out a groan. “Unfair,” she said, “I’m Mexican, they had mine done when I was like a week old. It’s like circumcision for girls.”

Anne gave her a slightly nauseous look, but likewise lifted a finger. Tenna, with her visibly whole ears, did too.

“What?” Tess said, turning towards her. “ _Where?”_

Tenna gave her a twinkly amused look. “You wanna see?” she said.

Well _that_ made Tess wonder if maybe she _didn’t_.

In a flash, Tenna shrugged the fishnet shirt off of her training bra. Devi sighed vaguely in the background, and Anne sat forward. Tenna tucked her thumbs underneath the band of the bra and pulled it up, revealing the tiny glittering barbells of nipple piercings. Tess’s stomach flipped so hard that she barely noticed anyone or anything else in the room for several seconds.

“Unbelievable,” Anne hissed, “I’ve been begging my parents for those for _ages_ , and you’ve just—you’ve just got them! I knew I should have just gotten it done without asking.”

Tenna flicked one barbell, hot pink plastic against areola so brown it was almost violet. Tess’s stomach gave another twist, hotter and deeper inside of her.

“Actually my parents were fine with it,” Tenna said, with a shrug. “They’re very into the whole ‘you are the architect of your body’ thing ever since I came out.”

She snapped the band of the bra back down over her chest, and Tess let out a breath she hadn’t meant to be holding. Next to her, Nny had his face scrunched up in distaste.

“If you ask _me_ ,” he started, and in a pure panic response, Tess shoved another slice of cake into his hands, whereupon he promptly lost track of whatever rant concerning the sexualizing of the body modification industry or what the hell ever he was about to start.

“Actually,” Tenna said, rolling up her fishnet for the night, “they were way harder to sell on the idea of Nny staying over. I don’t know what it is about grownups, but when they get you in the girl box they _really_ get you in the girl box. Turns out the girl box is full of a few hundred years worth of broken bullshit.”

“Tell me about it,” Devi muttered, and knocked back enough cherry cola to make a girl see double.

Tess won Never Have I Ever, a dubious honor that made her feel if anything _more_ embarrassed about her relative lack of worldly experience, especially when compared to people who all lost points for various counts of theft, battery, and assault. She stared at her four fingers for a while after the game had broken up into Devi and Nny hotly debating whether attempted murder qualified as “breaking the law”, if no murder was successfully perpetrated.

Every other time she’d played this game, it devolved into boys asking sly probing questions with hungry mouths, dripping sexual innuendo. It was disorienting to hear about eating chalk and sleeping in alleys and going by other names—she was madly jealous of Tenna, who had gotten to try out not just her deadname but also Tonja and Tenna and might not stop there, she might _never_ stop, because who was going to make her? And Tess couldn’t even _consider_ going by a cooler name without hearing the raucous laughter of the lunch table rattling around her head. She was dead in the water.

Nobody even bothered to ask if she’d ever given head. She could at least have put up a fifth finger for that.

 

Anne was shaking out her wrists like a theater kid about to launch into a monologue, as Tenna cut the lights. 

The wicks radiated their hot little circle of light, cinnamon scented and vanilla and the enigmatic smell of hot wax. With the warm ball of candlelight throwing her shadow against the wall, Anne lit each of them ceremoniously, putting out match after match with a flick of her wrist until—at the last candle, on the dresser above her seat—she held the blazing match for a moment at her lips, and then put it out against her dark wet tongue. As the matchhead hissed against her tongue, she gave Tess a slow, smug look.

“Show off,” Devi muttered, even as Tenna sat forward and clapped with unreserved delight.

“Could you show me how to do that?” Tenna said, “I could scare the _shit_ out of some people at the picket line.”

Anne flicked the dead match over her shoulder and sat down at the head of the board, hiking her velvet skirt up around her thighs so she could kneel without snapping a seam. “Yeah,” she drawled, “but first you have to enter into a blood pact with Mannon and eat the dark fruit of his unearthly garden which sees no sun.”

Devi cast Tess a weary, knowing look and said, “Pretty shitty garden if it doesn’t get any sunlight.”

“It’s an _allegory_ , Delacruz,” Anne said primly.

“Oh,” Devi said, “get a load of that, _allegorical_ fruit. What’s the calorie count on those?”

 Tenna pushed Devi over, a palm against the side of her head until she toppled sideways onto her elbow.  “No fighting around the Ouija board,” she said, “the ghosts will sense weakness in the ranks.”

“Lay your hands on the planchette,” Anne intoned, not deigning to lower herself to the level of acknowledging horseplay. One by one, with varying levels of mutinous sentiment, four pairs of hands were laid over the little wooden toy. When Anne leaned forward, the unearthly garden of her perfectly curled hair shifted and caught the candlelight. Through the neckline of her dress, Tess could see the shadowy V between the half globes of her cleavage, a fatal arrow drawing down to hidden places.

“Spirits of the dark,” Anne said, her eyes fluttering shut. “Take pity on us and our suffering beneath the tyrant sun.”

 _Well some of us suffer more than others_ , Tess thought, eyeing the perfect golden hue of Anne’s skin. Even Devi, light as she was, took a tan better than Tess. While this gave Tess her one and _only_ leg up in the banshee look-alike contest that was high school gothicism, it also meant she boiled like a lobster in the sun. Anne Gwish would never be caught dead suffering the indignity of a sunburn.

Anne Gwish’s controlling palm buzzed against Tess’s fingers, holding the planchette and all of them over it still. Touching her was like plugging into a live wire, a well of something that made Tess's muscles twitch. Even if there were no spirits in the room, Tess didn't doubt that the ghost in Anne's shell would move something as small as a planchette with ease.

 

Sometime around midnight, as hunger struck, the bulk of the party peeled off to fetch supplies for s’mores from the 24/7 corner store.

“I volunteer to hold the marshmallows,” Tenna said, as the stairs creaked softly.

“You just want to squeeze them,” Devi’s distant voice retorted, “you’ll have them flat as a deflated bounce house by the time we get home.”

And then the front door gave a muffled clap as it slammed shut behind the venturing party, leaving Tess alone with the last person she ever expected to be alone with. Literally tingling from nerves, Tess kept her head down and gathered up strewn paper plates. Her neck was hot with the potential of watching eyes. When she dared glance up, she found Anne perched on the end of Tenna’s bed, not even looking at her. Anne’s hands were tugging fitfully at her outfit, her lip pushed into a sadly very attractive pout.

 “Ugh,” Anne said, twisting and cupping the underwire of her bra through that velvet dress. “This sucks. Beauty is _pain_ , Tess, I promise you. It’s such a burden.”

Unsure how to respond to the implication that she wouldn’t know anything about the Burden of Beauty, Tess went to pinch out the last of the candles, reduced by the bright lamplight, smelling of wax and sweet cinnamon. The light went out under her fingers, with a slither of black smoke.

“That’s it,” Anne said, wriggling in Tess’s peripheral vision, “I’m getting out of this thing.” There was a flash of thigh, as she grabbed the hem of her dress, and then Tess whirled. There was a soft rustle, a _hmph_ of effort. By the sound of it, she was struggling with the velvet mini-dress.

Tess stood for a moment just watching the door, her teeth in her lip. She turned back in time to see Anne drop her arms, not quite able to reach the clasps without wriggling out of the whole dress once and for all.

“ _Will_ you get this for me,” Anne said sharply, as if it were Tess’s fault that she couldn’t find any give in her ridiculous outfit.

Tess felt as though her ribcage had suddenly become two sizes too small for her pumping heart. “Sure,” she said, through a dry mouth.

Anne leaned forward, her back arching, as Tess settled onto the bed behind her. It _was_ a bit of a mystery how to get the thing off, when the sleeves went all the way down to the wrist and the neckline was as high in the back as it was _low_ in the front. But every second that she sat there wringing her hands seemed to wind Anne’s impatience up one more dangerous notch. There only seemed to be one solution, and it was only sheer panic that made Tess brave enough to say, “Can you stand up?”

“What? Oh.” The impatience melted away in one easy wave, like ice under the sunshine, and Anne obliged, climbing off the bed and to her feet.

The dress clung tightly to her midback, velvet shimmering up each curve. Underneath the skirt, paralyzingly careful not to brush panties, Tess pressed her palms to the skin there and skimmed upward, under the fabric, rucking it up as she went until she hit the band of the bra. The hooks came undone easily.

“You’re so _lucky,”_ Anne sighed, “you’re what, an A cup? I bet you don’t even need to _wear_ a bra.”

“There’s, um, other reasons to wear one,” said Tess, who was absolutely mortified by the possibility of her nipples showing through her shirt. She couldn’t handle the idea of people seeing something like that, of _boys_ seeing something like that, you know how _boys_ are.

Tess started to withdraw, but Anne cleared her throat pointedly until Tess got the message and undid the shoulder straps as well, so that they could get it off without having to fuck with the sleeves. As she reached around the front to free the cups, Anne said, “Like _what_.”

Between Tess’s forearms, the slow rise and fall of Anne’s breathing moved her chest. Tess tugged the cups down with as little contact as she could manage. “Oh,” she said, miserably, “like. You know.”

Once Tess had pulled away, Anne turned around and took the lace thing with the puffy push-up cups from Tess’s hand. She tossed it over her shoulder, onto Tenna’s bed, haphazard. Her silhouette was softened, without the perfect rigid half-globes of the Victoria’s secret contraption. They moved under the velvet as she twisted and went took her seat again, bouncing gently with the give of the bedspring. The peaks of her nipples prodded against the glimmering fabric, delicate and forbidden to observe.

Anne made another one of her longsuffering, trademark groans. Tess snapped her gaze up in a moment of guilty panic, but Anne wasn’t even looking at her.

“They’re so _heavy_ ,” she said. “Look, feel this.”

And she took Tess by the wrist, dragging her up to cup the soft underside of one breast. The velvet was cool and soft to Tess’s trembling fingers, the weight in the palm of her hand dizzying. It slithered over her fingers, as Anne closed her hand around Tess’s and forced the palm into a squeeze.

“See?” Anne said, and all once Tess felt like an insect that had been coaxed into the sticky trap of a spider’s web.

“Yeah,” Tess croaked.

Anne let her go. Tess should have let go too, but Tess was too busy losing the battle against her better sense. Under the gentle pressure of Tess’s palm, fingertips digging in, the fabric wrinkled from the dipping neckline to the seam of the sleeve with glowing folds. One nipple pushed up a little higher than the other.

“They’re really beautiful,” Tess said, and meant it, although she would have given anything on earth _not to_ have said it.

“Oh,” Anne said, all at once smug and pleased as she settled back onto her palms. “I guess they’re alr _ight_.”

Tess squeezed hard. Anne took a sharp breath, her half-lidded eyes widening. Velvet bunched under Tess’s fingers, where her hard grip made depressions in soft flesh. As she kneaded at it, Anne made a little sound nothing like her usual groaning theatrics.

Tess ran her thumb over the small, stiff peak in her grip and Anne shuddered.

“This is what I meant about bras,” Tess said, monstrously calm all of a sudden, now that she was absolutely fucked beyond redemption. “I can see these through your shirt.”

She let go. Anne’s unbreaking gaze followed her hand as it went, her teeth scraping black lipstick from the inside of her lips. This moment might have been Anne's doing, Tess realized, but she was just as in over her head as the fly she'd half-cunningly snared in her web.

“You,” Anne said, “ah, you should probably. Show me yours. I mean, if you’re not _embarrassed_.”

In Tess’s strange, audacious serenity, she felt all at once as if a spider was emerging from the dull shell of her insect’s carapace, lovely and deadly, and hungry.


End file.
